Chapter X

OF MODERATION, OR THE TYPE OF GOVERNMENT BY LAW.

Sec. 1. Meaning of the terms Chasteness and Refinement.

Of objects which, in respect of the qualities hitherto considered, appear to have equal claims to regard, we find, nevertheless, that certain are preferred to others in consequence of an attractive power, usually expressed by the terms "chasteness, refinement, or elegance," and it appears also that things which in other respects have little in them of natural beauty, and are of forms altogether simple and adapted to simple uses, are capable of much distinction and desirableness in consequence of these qualities only. It is of importance to discover the real nature of the ideas thus expressed.

Sec. 2. How referable to temporary fashions.

Something of the peculiar meaning of the words is referable to the authority of fashion and the exclusiveness of pride, owing to which that which is the mode of a particular time is submissively esteemed, and that which by its costliness or its rarity is of difficult attainment, or in any way appears to have been chosen as the best of many things, (which is the original sense of the words elegant and exquisite,) is esteemed for the witness it bears to the dignity of the chooser.

But neither of these ideas are in any way connected with eternal beauty, neither do they at all account for that agreeableness of color and form which is especially termed chasteness, and which it would seem to be a characteristic of rightly trained mind in all things to prefer, and of common minds to reject.

Sec. 3. How to the perception of completion.

Sec. 4. Finish, by great masters esteemed essential.

There is however another character of artificial productions, to which these terms have partial reference, which it is of some importance to note, that of finish, exactness, or refinement, which are commonly desired in the works of men, owing both to their difficulty of accomplishment and consequent expression of care and power (compare Chapter on Ideas of Power, Part I. Sect, i.,) and from their greater resemblance to the working of God, whose "absolute exactness," says Hooker, "all things imitate, by tending to that which is most exquisite in every particular." And there is not a greater sign of the imperfection of general taste, than its capability of contentment with forms and things which, professing completion, are yet not exact nor complete, as in the vulgar with wax and clay and china figures, and in bad sculptors with an unfinished and clay-like modelling of surface, and curves and angles of no precision or delicacy; and in general, in all common and unthinking persons with an imperfect rendering of that which might be pure and fine, as church-wardens are content to lose the sharp lines of stone carving under clogging obliterations of whitewash, and as the modern Italians scrape away and polish white all the sharpness and glory of the carvings on their old churches, as most miserably and pitifully on St. Mark's at Venice, and the Baptisteries of Pistoja and Pisa, and many others; so also the delight of vulgar painters in coarse and slurred painting, merely for the sake of its coarseness,[29] as of Spagnoletto, Salvator, or Murillo, opposed to the divine finish which the greatest and mightiest of men disdained not, but rather wrought out with painfulness and life spending; as Leonardo and Michael Angelo, (for the latter, however many things he left unfinished, did finish, if at all, with a refinement that the eye cannot follow, but the feeling only, as in the Pieta of Genoa,) and Perugino always, even to the gilding of single hairs among his angel tresses, and the young Raffaelle, when he was heaven taught, and Angelico, and Pinturicchio, and John Bellini, and all other such serious and loving men. Only it is to be observed that this finish is not a part or constituent of beauty, but the full and ultimate rendering of it, so that it is an idea only connected with the works of men, for all the works of the Deity are finished with the same, that is, infinite care and completion: and so what degrees of beauty exist among them can in no way be dependent upon this source, inasmuch as there are between them no degrees of care. And therefore, as there certainly is admitted a difference of degree in what we call chasteness, even in Divine work, (compare the hollyhock or the sunflower with the vale lily,) we must seek for it some other explanation and source than this.

Sec. 5. Moderation, its nature and value

And if, bringing down our ideas of it from complicated objects to simple lines and colors, we analyze and regard them carefully, I think we shall be able to trace them to an under-current of constantly agreeable feeling, excited by the appearance in material things of a self-restrained liberty, that is to say, by the image of that acting of God with regard to all his creation, wherein, though free to operate in whatever arbitrary, sudden, violent, or inconstant ways he will, he yet, if we may reverently so speak, restrains in himself this his omnipotent liberty, and works always in consistent modes, called by us laws. And this restraint or moderation, according to the words of Hooker, ("that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure of working, the same we term a law,") is in the Deity not restraint, such as it is said of creatures, but, as again says Hooker, "the very being of God is a law to his working," so that every appearance of painfulness or want of power and freedom in material things is wrong and ugly; for the right restraint, the image of Divine operation, is both in them, and in men, a willing and not painful stopping short of the utmost degree to which their power might reach, and the appearance of fettering or confinement is the cause of ugliness in the one, as the slightest painfulness or effort in restraint is a sign of sin in the other.

Sec. 6. It is the girdle of beauty.

Sec. 7. How found in natural curves and colors.

Sec. 8. How difficult of attainment, yet essential to all good.

I have put this attribute of beauty last, because I consider it the girdle and safeguard of all the rest, and in this respect the most essential of all, for it is possible that a certain degree of beauty may be attained even in the absence of one of its other constituents, as sometimes in some measure without symmetry or without unity. But the least appearance of violence or extravagance, of the want of moderation and restraint, is, I think, destructive of all beauty whatsoever in everything, color, form, motion, language, or thought, giving rise to that which in color we call glaring, in form inelegant, in motion ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought undisciplined, in all unchastened; which qualities are in everything most painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular operation. And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been so often noted respecting the subtilty and almost invisibility of natural curves and colors, and why it is that we look on those lines as least beautiful which fall into wide and far license of curvature, and as most beautiful which approach nearest (so that the curvilinear character be distinctly asserted) to the government of the right line, as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies of the religious painters; and thus in color it is not red, but rose-color which is most beautiful, neither such actual green as we find in summer foliage partly, and in our painting of it constantly; but such gray green as that into which nature modifies her distant tints, or such pale green and uncertain as we see in sunset sky, and in the clefts of the glacier and the chrysoprase, and the sea-foam; and so of all colors, not that they may not sometimes be deep and full, but that there is a solemn moderation even in their very fulness, and a holy reference beyond and out of their own nature to great harmonies by which they are governed, and in obedience to which is their glory. Whereof the ignorance is shown in all evil colorists by the violence and positiveness of their hues, and by dulness and discordance consequent, for the very brilliancy and real power of all color is dependent on the chastening of it, as of a voice on its gentleness, and as of action on its calmness, and as all moral vigor on self-command. And therefore as that virtue which men last, and with most difficulty attain unto, and which many attain not at all, and yet that which is essential to the conduct and almost to the being of all other virtues, since neither imagination, nor invention, nor industry, nor sensibility, nor energy, nor any other good having, is of full avail without this of self-command, whereby works truly masculine and mighty are produced, and by the signs of which they are separated from that lower host of things brilliant, magnificent and redundant, and farther yet from that of the loose, the lawless, the exaggerated, the insolent, and the profane, I would have the necessity of it foremost among all our inculcating, and the name of it largest among all our inscribing, in so far that, over the doors of every school of Art, I would have this one word, relieved out in deep letters of pure gold,--Moderation.

FOOTNOTES

[29] It is to be carefully noted that when rude execution is
evidently not the result of imperfect feeling and desire (as in
these men above named, it is) but of thought; either impatient,
which there was necessity to note swiftly, or impetuous, which it
was well to note in mighty manner, as pre-eminently and in both
kinds the case with Tintoret, and often with Michael Angelo, and in
lower and more degraded modes with Rubens, and generally in the
sketches and first thoughts of great masters; there is received a
very noble pleasure, connected both with ideas of power (compare
again Part I. Sect. ii. Chap. I.) and with certain actions of the
imagination of which we shall speak presently. But this pleasure is
not received from the beauty of the work, for nothing can be
perfectly beautiful unless complete, but from its simplicity and
sufficiency to its immediate purpose, where the purpose is not of
beauty at all, as often in things rough-hewn, pre-eminently for
instance in the stones of the foundations of the Pitti and Strozzi
palaces, whose noble rudeness is to be opposed both to the useless
polish, and the barbarous rustications of modern times, (although
indeed this instance is not without exception to be received, for
the majesty of these rocky buildings depends also in some measure
upon the real beauty and finish of the natural curvilinear
fractures, opposed to the coarseness of human chiselling,) and
again, as it respects works of higher art, the pleasure of their
hasty or imperfect execution is not indicative of their beauty, but
of their majesty and fulness of thought and vastness of power. Shade
is only beautiful when it magnifies and sets forth the forms of fair
things, so negligence is only noble when it is, as Fuseli hath it,
"the shadow of energy." Which that it may be, secure the substance
and the shade will follow, but let the artist beware of stealing the
manner of giant intellects when he has not their intention, and of
assuming large modes of treatment when he has little thoughts to
treat. There is large difference between indolent impatience of
labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between
leaving things unfinished because we have more to do, or because we
are satisfied with what we have done. Tintoret, who prayed hard, and
hardly obtained, that he might be permitted, the charge of his
colors only being borne, to paint a new built house from base to
battlement, was not one to shun labor, it is the pouring in upon him
of glorious thoughts in inexpressible multitude that his sweeping
hand follows so fast. It is as easy to know the slightness of
earnest haste from the slightness of blunt feeling, indolence, or
affectation, as it is to know the dust of a race, from the dust of
dissolution.